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Kruger National Park
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After we left Jo'burg, Mary and I went to Nelspruit on a 6 hour bus ride. It is one of the larger cities in the north-eastern province of Mpumalanga. We came here so that we could visit Kruger National Park. I studied the park in my courses of Wildlife Management in Kenya. The park is unique in the sense that there are fences the entire way around it, keeping all the animals inside. It is essentially a huge, enormous zoo. The animals are in their natural environment, but they can't migrate as they normally would. The idea behind the fences is that people can live around it without being disturbed by animals tromping through their fields or homes. This is different from Kenya where the parks are oasises for the animals to find refuge from the humans and find drinking water. However then, because there are no fences the animals can roam through people's fields and homes during their migrations.
There are many difference opinions on the topic. Some conservationists believe that the best option is to let the animals be wild and natural; they should migrate and not be confined to one section of land. Some people, more in favor of development for humans, believe that by having the fences the people outside can develop without the threat from the animals. I don't know what the best solution is because I was not able to speak to people who lived close to the park like I did in Kenya. The people in Kenya didn't like the parks because they were hurt by the animals, but received little monetary compensation. On the outside of Kruger NP there were still a lot of shacks and simple dwellings for the black people. Apparently the park creates 5,000 jobs, but apparently they don't receive that swell of a salary.
I never went to a Kenyan park as a tourist; we were always conducting interviews, counting animals or attending lectures in the park. This was my first time to see what all the other people see when they go "on safari." It was expensive, about $100 a day, to hire someone to drive us around in an open sided Land-Rover, have a guide tell us about the behavior of the animals and help us search the bush for some that are more camouflaged. This price also included the park entrance fee, the price for camping inside the park and all the meals during the safari. It would have been possible to hire a car and drive ourselves around. However there are some negatives to this: 1. you are lower to the ground, 2. only one person can scan both sides of the road looking for game, 3. we wouldn't have had the information supplied by our guide (I learned a lot about Kenyan animals and they aren't all the same down here.) After doing the safari, we decided it was worth it.
I obviously took tons of pictures, but I only had my small digital camera so they aren't fantastic - I will load them as soon as I get to a place with a fast and cheap internet connection. One of the big things that people on safaris are always talking about is the "Big 5." These are the animals that people want to see most: elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard. We saw 4 out of 5, leopards are notoriously hard to see because they are nocturnal and hang out in trees as far from the road as possible during the day. We were also lucky enough to be there in the spring time and saw babies of almost everything: baby lions, rhinos, elephants, impalas and zebras. We also saw herds of khaki clad, rich foreigners, with enormous cameras, ogling at all the wildlife - sometimes there were also interesting to watch.
It was all entertaining, but brought back all the questions I never really solved from Kenya. What is more important human development or animal freedom? It still seems like both can't happen at the same time. In Kenya the animals reign supreme, mostly, and the people around the parks suffer. In South Africa the people reign supreme, mostly, and are able to "control" nature to their liking, but the animals inside the park suffer (they can't follow their natural instincts of migration and are culled or shot when there are too many of one species.) There will probably never be one exact answer for every part of the world, but it was interesting to see how South Africa has chosen to approach the problem.
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